Wild Life

by Keena Roberts

  Later in the afternoon, a tour group from some company we’d never heard of (NOT Xaxaba or Delta, they know better) came up to us while we were with the baboons (which they absolutely should not do).

  Obnoxious Tourist: “I hear you are studying baboons.”

  Me: “Yes.”

  OT: “Haven’t they been ‘studied’ to death already? I would assume that all monkeys have been studied to death by now.”

  Me: “Well, there’s still a lot to learn.”

  OT: “I’ve seen monkeys before. Nasty little things aren’t they? Like orangutans.”

  Me: “Orangutans are apes, not monkeys. And they live in Asia.”

  OT: “Whatever.”

  Me: “What do YOU do?”

  OT: “I work of course! How do you think I could afford a vacation like this? Just keep their filthy little hands off my luggage.”

  Right, asshole, because I really can control this group of monkeys. If I could I’d tell them to steal your luggage and go through all your stuff.

  September 5, 1997

  Keena’s Journal

  We have a book about the flowers and plants of the delta and today I read that there was a kind of acacia bush that has leaves that make a local anesthetic if chewed and applied to a wound, like an insect bite. I found the bush and chewed a bunch of the leaves but all they did was make my tongue go numb. It was an interesting experience.

  Lucy and I spent a lot of time poring over this book. There were beautiful drawings of all the trees and shrubs but also a section describing the traditional Wayeyi uses for each plant, most of which were confirmed by Mokupi. Lucy and I tested all of them.

  In addition to discovering which plants could be used to make an anesthetic, we learned which tree had bark that could paralyze fish (we tried it, but it turned out to be a failure), which roots were used to weave bracelets to protect against witches (also a failure; not because we were attacked by a witch but because the roots didn’t weave; they snapped in half), and about seeds called “lucky beans” that would bring you friends if you carried one in your left pocket (but don’t eat them, because they are incredibly poisonous). We also read about a kind of squash that you could use as a symbolic representation of someone else’s heart. If you left the squash in the sun, it would heat up and explode, making the heart of the corresponding person also explode. We didn’t test this one.

  We read that boiling a sausage fruit would yield a beautiful purple dye, but we boiled one for three and a half days and learned that it did not. We also discovered that palm wine is difficult to make if you can’t figure out how to properly tap a palm tree. Marula liquor, on the other hand, is easy.

  Thick and brown, with a taste like a fruity version of Kahlúa, Amarula is one of the exports Botswana is most known for. It is made from the fruit of the marula tree, which ferments easily after it ripens. As luck would have it, we had a marula tree right in camp—it was my favorite reading tree. Every fall, the tree would explode with fruit and the baboons would come into camp to fight over it, pooping all over the place and, once, running off into the woods with my copy of My Ántonia.

  When Lucy and I read how easy it is to make marula liquor, we decided to make our own; we harvested a pile of the ripest fruits, washed and cleaned them, and put them in the storage hut in Tupperware containers full of water, at which point we promptly forgot about them.

  Dad discovered the containers a few months later behind a case of beer, but insisted on tasting the liquid himself before letting us have some. He said it was a good thing he did, because the alcohol was so strong it would have likely killed us. As I carried the liquor into the woods to pour it out, I thought for the hundredth time since coming back to Baboon Camp how much more comfortable I felt in this land of beetles, baboons, and poisonous, homemade moonshine. I loved the baboons and the rush of running away from lions. Every cell of my body felt alive. This was the Keena I knew. And there was nothing she couldn’t do now that she was back.

  CHAPTER 11

  There Are No Doctors Here

  Living so close to the river, it was easy to forget that Botswana is mostly a desert. Even as the seasonal flood receded and the melapo dried up, we could still smell the water and use the boat, though there were always a few weeks at the height of the dry season when we had to pull it out of what remained of the river and wait for the flood to return. Water controlled everything we did, just as it did for the animals. When the flood was high and we could boat, the animals moved farther inland and spread out, since the full melapo meant water was plentiful. But when the flood dried out and the water supply disappeared from everywhere except the river itself, our island quickly became crowded with all kinds of animals huddling closer to the last permanent water source. The baboons rarely left camp, and all around us herds of animals moved through the woods, either going to the river or waiting for others to pass by so they could ambush them to eat. All of a sudden, there were lions and elephants everywhere, big herds of buffalo, and zebras out on the melapo in front of camp, and we couldn’t turn around without bumping into smaller herds of impala, kudu, and giraffes that kept close to the outskirts of camp.

  As the temperature climbed higher and higher we became obsessed with the weather. How hot was it going to get today? What time would the sun finally set and give us some relief? And, most importantly of all, when was it going to rain?

  People in the town of Maun called October “suicide month.” It was still too early in the season for rain to arrive, but already so hot that just being outside was miserable. Cloudless day after cloudless day, the sun beat down for hour after hour of relentless, suffocating heat. Most of the tourist lodges closed for the season because it was too hot for tourists to visit, and even if they did, all they would see were animals lying around in the shade feeling just as miserable as the tourists.

  The heat was so intense in camp that we had to completely change our daily routine in order to minimize our exposure to the weather. The sun rose, swelteringly hot, at 4:15 a.m. Soon it became too hot to stay in the tents, and even Lucy, who loves a good sleep-in, would be up and about by 6:00 a.m. Days like these were divided into two mini-days for my family: one from 4:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. when it was still cool enough to work and cook, and one between 5:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. after the sun had started to set. Between the hours of 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., though, it was too hot to function. We left the baboons and came back to camp, schoolwork stopped, and we sequestered ourselves in various shady spots around camp to sweat out the day. It was too hot to read. It was too hot to talk, too hot to eat, and too hot to sleep. We tried playing cards and darts, but the conversation inevitably turned to just how fucking hot it was. Lucy and I dunked our heads under the faucet at the laundry sink and lay around on plastic kitchen chairs, making stupid conversation about the weather. The pens we kept in the kitchen to record the temperature melted in our hands. All our electronics overheated and the freezer struggled to keep our food cold. Daily, we registered upward of 120 degrees in the sun and easily 110 in the shade (before the thermometer we were using also began to melt and we had to put it in the fridge).

  Finally, as the sun started to set, we could muster enough energy to start doing camp maintenance and plug the computers in, though it never really cooled off. At night, Lucy and I woke each other up to walk to the shower and soak ourselves and our T-shirts before going back to lying on our cots, trying to sleep. We were lucky it wasn’t humid heat, but it was dry enough to severely dehydrate us if we failed to drink enough water. I kept a bottle of water in my hands at all times and tried to stick to a drinking schedule of one full bottle an hour that I hoped would keep me from getting sick.

  One afternoon, I was lying in the hammock behind my parents’ tent reading a book I’d borrowed from Dad about the Napoleonic Wars. In the chapter I was reading, the British captain’s ship had run into a calm off the coast of Martinique and the crew was slowly going mad from the heat and lack of water. The author described the crew ba
king in the sun on the exposed deck of the ship, getting sicker and sicker as they felt the boat rock side to side underneath them. As I read, I felt like I was falling into the book—I could feel the ship rocking beneath me, the blistering tropical sun beating down, and felt as though I’d become one of the crew members. So this is what it feels like to die, I thought to myself, slowly wasting away off the shore of Martinique.

  I sat up, trying to clear my fuzzy head, and realized that I didn’t just feel sick, I was sick. My head pounded, my hands were clammy, and everywhere I looked the trees vibrated in the thick air. Dizzily, I rolled out of the hammock and stumbled toward the kitchen, willing myself not to vomit. I realized I hadn’t had my bottle of water with me for a couple of hours and I was now dangerously dehydrated.

  Once inside the kitchen, I sat down on the cement floor and tried to figure out what to do next. We were already out of the oral rehydration solution I’d gotten at REI, so I had to think of something else. My brain wasn’t working, but I knew I had to act quickly to keep myself from getting even sicker. No one was around and I didn’t have the energy to shout. Okay, I thought, you’re going to have to figure this out by yourself.

  Hand over hand, I pulled myself over to the shelf where we kept our guidebooks. We had a book on emergency medicine and I knew somewhere in the middle was a section on dehydration. After a few minutes of paging through the book, I found the section that described how to make the at-home oral rehydration solution I hated. I remember thinking how horribly ironic it was that I’d let my dehydration get to this level, considering how often I badgered the rest of my family about the importance of drinking water.

  Still moving very slowly, I mixed water, sugar, and salt together in the proportions specified by the book, and sat down on the cool concrete, determined not to move until I’d finished the whole bottle and mixed another. It tasted terrible, but I knew it would work if I gave it some time.

  By the time Dad came to the kitchen an hour later, I’d managed to drink three bottles of my homemade rehydration drink, and was feeling much better. The trees had stopped vibrating, and my hands were no longer clammy, though I had a raging headache. When he asked me if I was okay, I told him I’d changed my mind about the Napoleonic Wars and he could have his book back.

  The heat was all anyone could think or talk about. Our friends in Maun spent their days on the radio talking about who had seen a cloud and whether it meant rain might come someday. We waited for the smallest sign that the weather might change, from rumors of a cloud sighted upriver to a change in how the birds sang in the morning.

  October 19, 1997

  Keena’s Journal

  There is an enormous fire across the river. At night all you can see is a glow filling the whole sky and during the day, clouds of smoke billowing up all along the riverbank. I spent an hour sitting in the fig tree looking at it. I could almost see the flames. I was being very quiet and the squirrels forgot I was sitting there. One was eating a fig the size of his own head and it looked like he was wearing a helmet.

  The fire is very close to us but we’ll be safe as long as it doesn’t cross the river. If it does, we would have to take everything important and put it in the boat and then set the boat loose out in what’s left of the lagoon (this would include the computers and data from the baboons and all the recording equipment). Then we would have to roll the petrol and paraffin drums into the water by the boat dock so they wouldn’t explode…and then do our best to beat the fire back from camp so all the buildings don’t burn down. They are all built with dry letlhaka so it wouldn’t take much for them to be destroyed.

  (Later)

  We can see the flames. They are exactly on the opposite side of the river. The fire is huge. It is sweeping across an area bigger than our island and the flames are rising high up into the sky. I can feel the heat from the flames and the roar from the fire is very loud. Little bits of ash are floating through the air and staining my hands and face black with soot. I hope it goes away.

  October 21, 1997

  Keena’s Journal

  We had only a tiny bit of rain yesterday, but it did enough to cool the dust and make the trees drip. The fire went out, as far as we can tell. No smoke, flames, or ash anywhere. Amazing that so small a rainstorm could put out so huge a fire. Or maybe it burned itself out? After my shower I got restless so I went running on the paths around camp. Mom said I was only allowed to run eight laps because she didn’t know where the lions were, but I ran twelve. It was great, and I didn’t get too hot because my hair was wet. I should do that more often.

  November 3, 1997

  Keena’s Journal

  It is 130 degrees today. It is too hot to write.

  November 5, 1997

  Keena’s Journal

  We were going to go for a game drive today, but, for the one billionth day in a row, the baboons came into camp to keep working on the huge crop of figs in the big tree. Even though Mom started screaming obscenities as soon as the first animals entered camp and settled in, still they came. She really, really hates it when they come into camp. It means we can’t eat (because they can’t see us with food) and have to spend all our time making sure they don’t rip apart the tents or run off with any of our stuff. It’s a full-time job.

  Mom stormed into the storage hut and came out brandishing a huge jar of peri peri sauce. She marched into the baboons and started flinging the peri peri sauce all over the figs, hoping that they wouldn’t like the hot pepper and would stop eating them. The baboons didn’t notice. Still swearing, she went back to the storage hut and came out with a box of matches and started setting fire to the figs. They didn’t really burn but started smoldering. Mom was still standing among the baboons and the spicy, smoking figs when an elephant ran out of the woods and bellowed at her, making her drop the matches and dash back into the kitchen. Lucy and I were dying laughing but were trying to hide it because Mom was so mad at the baboons.

  November 6, 1997

  Keena’s Journal

  At about 11 a.m., guess who arrived: the baboons! My parents were PISSED. I think a large amount of their anger comes from how unbelievably, fucking miserably hot it is, but they took it all out on the baboons. Because her experiment with matches didn’t work yesterday, today Mom decided to step it up a notch. Dad and I raked all the figs under the tree into a big pile (there were a LOT). The baboons ignored us the whole time and continued eating even while we raked. The final pile was more than two feet deep in the middle and covered most of the area under the tree. When we were finished, Mom came over and dumped a can full of petrol on the pile and set fire to it. She was in a terrible mood but I think hurling petrol on a flaming pile of figs made her feel a little better. It didn’t really work so we threw water on it, but the muffled explosions from the middle of the pile and the smoke that billowed out of it seemed to be enough to scare most of the baboons away. I was very happy to take a shower after that, since I was covered with soot and ash from the burning fig pile.

  Bart the baboon ignores my mother’s rage.

  November 7, 1997

  Keena’s Journal

  The baboons are BACK. They are still eating the burned pile of figs and I think Mom is going to lose her mind.

  Instead of doing school this morning we started shoveling the charred figs into wheelbarrows and taking them out onto the plain behind camp to be dumped. Mom said if the baboons are going to insist on eating the figs, they could do so outside the camp. It took a long time and the wheelbarrow loads were very heavy, especially in this heat. I really wanted to wash my hair but we have no more shampoo. All the bottles melted in the heat and the shampoo dripped into the dust.

  November 14, 1997

  Keena’s Journal

  It is HOT, HOT, HOT. It was so hot last night that I was awake, sweating, until midnight. I was trying to listen to animals but all I could think about was how hot I was. I finally fell asleep after I threw all my sheets on the floor, but I woke up again a few hours later
when I felt an ant crawling across my face. I didn’t think it was a big deal since this happens a lot, but after I flicked it off I felt two or three more on my forehead and then a LOT more on my legs and stomach. I turned on my flashlight and saw that I was COVERED with ants; they were all over me—the little worker ants, and the huge, pinchy soldier ants too. I screamed and jumped out of bed to turn on the light. Lucy woke up and threw some water from her water bottle on me to help get the ants off. We figured out that they had come through a small hole in the canvas (whyyyy!?) near my pillow. We smooshed them all with our textbooks and put some duct tape over the hole but I couldn’t make sure they were all out of my sheets until morning. Instead of going back to bed I piled my sheets on my cot and slept on the floor with my pillow. Yuck, I felt like they were crawling on me all night and I didn’t sleep much. During dinner, lions killed something across the lagoon and we could hear the slurping, crunching, and growling echoing all around us. It was a bit scary.